This is the Way the World Ends (34 page)

Sverre drank gin, studied the white Cat. Under these circumstances, could Paxton possibly be thinking of sex? Had he and Dr Valcourt managed to make love before their separation? The captain pivoted the scope, fixed on where the future had taken its revenge, five trees fruited with convicted war criminals, the sixth tree empty, waiting.

George’s mind was slipping away from him.

Autistically he watched the progress of the ice clock, drops falling noisily to their destination, each as sad and final as a tear. Bang, bang went the drops, and barely an hour remained.

Then half an hour. Twenty minutes. Ten.

On the
City of New York
, Sverre entered the periscope room and scanned the continent in search of Lieutenant Grass’s orchard.

Bang, bang went the drops.

George looked up. A great red stain bloomed above his head. His ceiling was bleeding. The stain grew rapidly, extending its wet peninsulas.

He guessed that he was seeing the last unexpected effect of nuclear war.

A dark shape attacked the bloody ceiling from above. A fissure appeared, then a river system of cracks. Bits of ceiling fell inward, striking George’s shoulders and chest, panicking his spermatids.

The shape bartered relentlessly, until at last the ceiling split with a sound like a despairing frog. A million ice pellets burst into the cell; red droplets spattered downward, a bloodstorm. The wind entered in raw, razoring gusts, howling like an unadmitted child.

Why the Antarctic Corps of Guards did not simply come through the door was a puzzle George felt no inclination to solve. He picked up the family portrait, zipped it into the hip pocket of his scopas suit. Brat is planning to die with his manportable thermonuclear device at his side, he thought, and I shall die with my Leonardo.

A gigantic vulture of a type once thought extinct descended through the breach and landed on the floor.

So, thought George, they’ve changed the mode of my execution. I’m not to be hanged but devoured. Probably quicker, actually.

The teratorn screeched. Blood spilled from its beak like soup slopping out of a tureen. Its ratty feathers were inlaid with jewels of ice.

When George noticed a scopas-suited human astride the vulture’s neck, he realized that something other than an execution was in the making.

‘Climb aboard,’ called the rider, removing her helmet and releasing a burst of red hair. ‘I still believe you’re innocent,’ said Morning Valcourt. She tossed George a pair of goggles and a parka, its hood rimmed with wolverine fur.

‘You’ve tamed it?’ asked George. ‘God!’

‘Psychology 101 – Operant Conditioning. It’s usually done on pigeons, but it also works with teratorns.’

As Morning replaced her helmet, footfalls echoed through the tunnels outside the cell. George heard curses.

Grabbing successive fistfuls of feathers and pulling himself upward, he ascended the vulture’s left wing. The bird stank. It regarded him with an eye resembling a volcanic cinder. He straddled its scrawny neck, threw his arms around Morning’s waist.

‘There was blood on the ceiling,’ he said.

‘A dead seal, so our friend would cut through the roof. The feeding frenzy, right? Hold tight!’

The door flew open, mashing into the cell wall. George looked down. The guard held a shotgun in one hand, a pistol in the other. A scar ran like a black wadi all the way from his forehead to his mouth, which at the moment gaped in astonishment.

The vulture beat its wings, and the fugitives rose toward the lightless dawn.

Guards scurried across the courtyard, their lanterns and torches darting about like crazed fireflies. Gun metal flashed. Rifleshots ripped through the dark, shattering the teratorn’s tail, so that great severed feathers drifted toward the ground. A slug drilled through George’s boot heel, another clipped the fur on his parka. The vulture screeched, shook, but stayed aloft. The volley was answered by dozens of shadowy, armed protestors streaming through the gate.
FREE PAXTON
, their banners said.
NO SYMBOLIC EXECUTIONS
. The protestors cheered as the fugitives ascended beyond the skirmish. Shots, bright bullets – bodies hit the ice, black blood erupting from their scopas suits, their screams mingling with the vulture’s cries. Oh, valuable bird, thought George, carnivorous angel, braver than an eagle, more perfect than a horse, Leonardo need not have feared you. With a great heave of its rudderless body, the teratorn cleared the Ice Palace ramparts. Soaring over a tower, it stretched its legs, opened its talons, and turned the Antarctic national flag into a dozen fluttering ribbons.

She’s made good on her scheme, Captain Sverre concluded when Juan Ramos failed to return to the white Cat. He smiled, pleased that his final voyage had not been made in the service of the McMurdo Agreement’s framers and their show trial. Pivoting the periscope, he watched a search party swarm across the Nimrod Glacier; their lanterns bobbed among the hummocks like wills-o’-the-wisp. He looked toward the plateau, focused on a black and menacing shape cutting across the southern constellations. A Soviet Spitball cruise missile? No – a teratorn. For unto them a species will be born. Fly, George. Fly, Morning . . .

‘Fly,
Teratornis
!’ George screamed.

Although he had ample cause to feel that his escape was a mirage, the wish-dream of a man confronting doom, the plausible discomforts of the flight told George that all was real. Bird riding was far less romantic than he would have guessed. Teratorns, it seemed, were flying ecosystems, their feathers clogged with parasites – worms, bugs – and the parasites of parasites. The wind lashed George’s face; it bored under his skin and made icy tunnels in his bones. The bird’s cervical vertebrae defied the padding of his suit, cutting into his thighs. The oozy odor of vulture sweat, death left in the sun, blew into his nostrils. Yes, this was truly happening.

‘Where are we going?’ he called above the hysterical wind, certain that at any moment he was going to fall off.

‘Across the Pole – to the boat!’ Morning called back.

The Pole! His gonads buzzed. In one of his seminiferous tubules, an Aubrey Paxton spermatid lay waiting to be steered into its appropriate duct. He could feel it.

‘The boat?’

‘She’s been at sea! Sverre brought her back into the Pacific, round the Getz Shelf and—’

Her words were claimed by the gale.

They were free! They could take the submarine, sail it into the timefolds, find places where flowers bloomed and rolling hills again wore lush mantles of grass. Free . . . Inevitably, inexorably, the psychic museum flashed through George’s brain. He saw Morning at the moment of giving birth, saw the infant’s soggy cord, its unexpectedly bountiful hair, its little hand, an arabesque of wrinkles.

Morning pounded on the vulture’s neck. It swung its beak away from the Endurance Cliffs and toward the crest of the glacier, beyond which lay the Queen Alexandra Mountain Range and, further still, the massive polar plateau, land of ten thousand ice limbos, uncountable hummocks, and that sad, forsaken point from which the traveler has nowhere to go but north.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In Which Our Hero and His Mate Visit a Garden of Ice and One of Earthly Delights

By nightfall the fugitives were at the Pole, a stretch of open plateau seamed against the dark sky and heaving with waves of frozen snow. Vents and antennas poked through the sasgruti, evidence of the submerged outpost known as New Amundsen-Scott Station. They hitched their teratorn to a chimney.

Someone had left a mirror ball – the type intended to decorate a garden – at the precise endpoint of the earth’s axis. George pressed it to his stomach. Was this how a pregnancy felt?

‘I shall regain my fertility here,’ he said. ‘I’ve got millions of spermatids now, but unless they are pulled into my epididymis, they will never mature.’

Morning’s shrug, her frown, the cant of her eyebrows – yes, there was certainly some skepticism in these gestures, but mainly, he felt, she was expressing curiosity. She wished him luck. Good, he thought, she’s keeping an open mind. We have no idea what wisdom the future would have brought, what breakthroughs in mushroom therapy and geomagnetic cures.

He hugged the mirror ball tighter. His lower body trembled. Am I committing the great Unitarian sin of self-delusion? No, something was definitely occurring in his gonads, a grand-scale spermatid migration. Tendrils of light rose from the ice, forming tiny diamond-like satellites that went into orbit around the mirror ball, a thousand sparkling moons following their own reflections. He sensed his spermatids’ happiness, the joy of children being chased by an incoming tide. Onward the seedlets marched, driven by the resilient, magnetic earth. They reached the epididymis. Here they would mature, learn to whip their fine, new tails. In time, as he recalled from the biology text he had read on the sub, they would be diluted by the great fluids of the seminal vesicles – what a technician God was! – then move on to new and exciting vistas:
vas deferens
, urethra, vagina, cervix, ovarian duct, uterine wall. While only one of his nascent spermatozoa was destined to sire his child, the others would do their part, bumping against the ovum with their protein-degrading enzymes – knock-knock-knock-knock – thus removing the troublesome outer layers.

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Aubrey Paxton.

The little moons stopped in their orbits, ceased to exist, and he set the mirror ball back on the ice.

Morning had shot two skuas with the assault rifle from her scopas suit. One corpse protruded from her backpack. The other lay across the
Teratornis
’s beak, and then – snap, gulp – the meal was gone, not dead long enough to suit the vulture, perhaps, but it made no complaint.

‘I believe I’m cured,’ George said. Spermatids were frolicking in his epididymis, home free.

‘You are a man of formidable ambition,’ Morning replied.

They followed the spray of her flashlight down a sloping wooden ramp and into the heart of the station. Tunnels branched left and right from the central bore, thirty-foot trenches roofed by arching sections of corrugated steel. Turning, they found themselves amid a congestion of radio equipment and meteorological instruments. Here they plucked the skua and cooked it on the primus stove from her suit. It was gone in two minutes. Weary, numb, they pushed their cold lips together, kissed without feeling it, engaged in a bulky Antarctic hug. They slept.

Dawn came, dark, dismal.

‘I have hope,’ he said.

‘Lazarev is fourteen hundred miles away,’ she replied.

‘Hope for our family.’

Morning fired up the primus stove and began preparing coffee.

‘Yes, I know, it’s hard to imagine bringing the whole human species back,’ he said. ‘All that intermarriage – it gets messy, the genes degenerate or something. Still,’ he smiled, ‘Adam and Eve brought it off.’

‘I thought you were a Unitarian.’

‘All right, maybe it will be the last family – but it will
be
. Life is not nothing. Sverre can show us how to run the boat. We’ll take her out of here, away from all this ice and justice. We’ll get to someplace warm.’

Morning poured coffee into her expressionless mouth. She harvested ice flecks from her hair.

‘I’d like to know what you think,’ he said.

‘Do you want some coffee?’

‘No.’

She placed her chilled hands over the primus flame, moved them as if they were on a spit. ‘I think . . .’

‘Yes?’

His fianceé was at the most precise and unambiguous place on earth, yet she looked lost. ‘I think that we must get to Lazarev before we get to the Garden of Eden.’

‘Yes, but after Lazarev, we can try to become pregnant, and then—’

‘Men don’t want children, George, men want strategic options. Didn’t you lean anything at the trial?’

‘I want children. A child. Our child.’

‘You want Justine and Holly back.’

‘I want you and—’

Morning hurled a fistful of skua bones against the hard snow wall, slicing off his sentence. ‘Can’t you figure anything out on your own? Must it all be
explained
to you? In two days we’ll be flying over Skeidshoven Mountain. Do you know what Skeidshoven Mountain is, idiot?’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you do.’

I do not know what Skeidshoven Mountain is, he told himself, over and over. His bullet wound had not hurt so much since its inception. I do not know . . .

He knew. Oh, God, he knew. Damn you, Nostradamus, prince of frauds! And damn you as well, Leonardo, painter of lies!

He pulled the magic lantern slide from his breast pocket. His supposed wife smiled up at him, his alleged daughter still wore a merry face. With a quick slapping motion he rammed the glass rectangle against the floor. There was a sound like a nut encountering a nutcracker. It’s not everyone who gets to destroy a priceless Leonardo, he thought. And then his tears started, large and cold, as if an ice clock were ticking in his brain.

Morning removed her gloves and picked up a Leonardo sliver. It contained Aubrey’s head.

‘What is Skeidshoven Mountain?’ George asked. He knew.

She rested the sliver against her palm. ‘It’s where I . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘Gained the continent.’

She drew the glass across her flesh. Black blood rushed out. Clotting, it acquired the tormented contours and pinched skin of a weeping face.

‘On the second of May,’ she said, ‘a bright winter afternoon. I beheld my memories, and I had nothing. No children, no lovers, just a working knowlege of psychotherapy.’

Squeezing her eyelids together, she bottled up her tears.

Even with the frequent pauses for gulps and sighs, her story did not take long. Stowing away as the submarine left McMurdo Station . . . pretending to come aboard with Randstable . . . going to Sverre and convincing him that his prisoners were threatened with sudden mental collapse . . .

‘I wanted a
life
, George, not the dead dreams of those wretches in the limbos.’ Her tears escaped, hardening into thin bright glaciers before they could leave her face. ‘And I did it. I brought it off. You would never have loved a darkblood, but you loved
me
.’